Whether you’re a first-time Linux user, experienced developer, academic researcher, or enterprise administrator, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Resolute Raccoon is the best way to benefit from the latest advancements in the Linux…

69 points•d99kris•about 12 hours ago•77 comments•

77 comments

bArrayabout 12 hours ago
> TPM-backed full-disk encryption is now generally available in the Ubuntu installer. By tying encryption to the TPM security chip, disk encryption is bound to a specific device, significantly raising the bar for physical access attacks while improving the user experience.

That's great, but they are also intending to comply with the OS-level age verification [1]. Initial implementations will somehow be privacy protecting, but eventually the temptation to tie a specific person to an OS fingerprint will become too great.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rk4fj7/ubun...

Buttons840about 11 hours ago
How long until I can selectively tell certain websites I'm a child so they stop showing me ads?

They wanted the personal computer to store and report personal information. I hope they have their best surprised faces ready for when computers report what the owner wants them to report.

teekertabout 11 hours ago
That is only possible when you really are the owner. And the amount of device out there in the world where people really are the owner is rather small. (Just the Linux desktops and the GrapheneOS smartphones, etc.)
nekusarabout 11 hours ago
Dont ask permission.

Run firefox with Ublock Origin and all blocks turned on. Add Sponsorblock to block in-video sponsor crap on Youtube.

Run Bypass Paywalls Clean from https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bpc_uploads

jeroenhdabout 11 hours ago
How is that even remotely related?

The Linux implementation I've seen is the Freedesktop implementation that just responds to a user profile flag. There's no cryptography involved, it's just like asking for a room number like the adduser command does.

Edit: well except American states don't flag your operating system as illegal unless they ask for your room number. Canonical and all the other Linux companies really like being able to make money and not spend all of their earnings on lawyers.

1-6about 12 hours ago
Ubuntu has become the bloatware distro I've grown to dislike. Luckily with a CLI-based AI, one can choose any Linux flavor and customize it to their liking.
hermitShellabout 11 hours ago
Does anyone know of some good scripts or workflows to install Ubuntu (because it 'just works' e.g. comes with a lot of drivers) and then scale back to a Debian-like experience?

I've had issues starting with Debian because it doesn't ship with broad support for wifi hardware, and internet over USB to iphone hotspot also didn't work. The only option was to get wired ethernet to bring up wifi.

yjftsjthsd-habout 11 hours ago
As of Debian 12, they should include the non-free firmware by default, and even before that you didn't have to jump through a lot of hoops to add support
HarHarVeryFunnyabout 11 hours ago
Also, one of the better uses of AI is fixing your Ubuntu distro (presumably not the only one) when it becomes unusable after an upgrade due to replacing your Nvidia drivers or somesuch.
locknitpickerabout 11 hours ago
I've installed Ubuntu 26.04 on a desktop I had lying around and things just work. It had 24.04 before, and the update barely registered as a concern. That desktop also ran Windows, and Ubuntu was incomparably snappy, to the point I felt that my typing speed was the bottleneck.

What I don't like about Ubuntu is the halfsnap, half apt nonsense.

HarHarVeryFunnyabout 11 hours ago
> What I don't like about Ubuntu is the halfsnap, half apt nonsense.

I've had to use Claude multiple times to fix my Ubuntu distro when an upgrade causes some part of it to stop working, and this Snap/APT mishmash sometimes confuses it too: "you need the Snap version. I was wrong you need the APT version. I was wrong you need to build from source..". Gets there in the end if you give it a bit of help.

simoncionabout 11 hours ago
> Luckily with a CLI-based AI, one can choose...

One can choose any Linux distro that has good installation and operator's instructions, such as Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Red Hat, etc, etc, etc, and follow those instructions.

It might be hard for some youngsters and hypesters to believe, but novices were installing and operating Linux on their home computers long before LLM research even began.

xdavidliuabout 11 hours ago
im out of the loop here, whats the last sentence referring to?
RunSetabout 11 hours ago
Slop born of plagiarism. People would rather read a pastiche of documentation than the actual documentation.
plucabout 12 hours ago
I'm curious what the audience is for Ubuntu nowadays? If you use it - why Ubuntu over another distro? Is it still largely a beginner-friendly stepping stone?
BadBadJellyBeanabout 11 hours ago
I use it because I am very happy with the release schedule and the maturity. I don't want to use the latest greatest. I want something that works and has some manpower (and maybe money) behind it. I am not the biggest fan of snap but I know how to get around it.
theandrewbaileyabout 11 hours ago
May I suggest Debian? It's 90+% the same as Ubuntu, and is updated about as often as Ubuntu LTS, but no snaps.
screamingninjaabout 11 hours ago
Considered any alternatives? Like atomic OS images, e.g. Fedora derivatives?
e_labout 11 hours ago
Like most things, I imagine there are multiple audiences for Ubuntu. But for me:

- Inertia, I've used it for a long time.

- It's based on Debian. I like Debian and use it on servers.

- I chose it originally because it had better desktop support than Debian. It's possible that Debian is now also good, but see above...inertia.

- It (mostly) just works on a wide range of hardware, whilst remaining up-to-date with the latest Linux developments.

- I like the release cycles. Debian stable is too stable. Arch/Fedora/Debian-testing are too volatile. Ubuntu allows me to choose whether to follow the 9-month support window of a normal release; or the 5-year window of the LTS.

Everything above is highly subjective and by no means are other preferences invalid. All Linux distros are awesome in their own unique way.

ajd555about 11 hours ago
I used to run Arch out of engineering school (that's what we used there), and loved it. But as I started working on my business, I started having less time to simply configure my OS and fight it on a few things. The breaking point for me, when I switched to Ubuntu Desktop, was not being able to connect to my two monitors via a dock (2 display ports). It simply took too much of my time to figure out all the nuances of evdi between my Thinkpad and my Dell monitors - Ubuntu just...worked (I could have spent more time understanding the issue, but I just needed it to work) But as I get older and am starting to rethink my tech stack, I'm strongly considering going back to my dear Arch
anon7725about 11 hours ago
I use it because I like how it looks, it has sane defaults and is reliable. I am an "LTS to LTS" type person. My desktop pretty much looks like the default screenshots. Most of my customization comes through scripts and tools that I can install quickly after a reimage. Not a beginner.
Retr0idabout 11 hours ago
It used to be my "it just works" distro for systems I didn't want to spend time configuring, but they managed to make me feel like a second-class citizen as a not-enterprise-customer (not really anything specific, just a lot of small cuts).

I appreciate that they're running a business, but the Fedora/RHEL split feels much cleaner, and Fedora is my current go-to in instances where I used to reach for Ubuntu. (Or I use Debian, for headless/server setups)

edelbitterabout 11 hours ago
People switching or upgrading from soon-EoL versions beware: Ubuntu now defaults to uutils, which are reimplementations of GNU utils that deliberately do attempt to not read the original source (to be legally cleared to not comply with its copyleft expectations). The "correct" behavior is not always evident from POSIX, so uutils is by design an imperfect imitation with a long way to go for bug-by-bug compatibility.

While most data loss severity bugs reported in the 25.10 round of testing [1] have been resolved, the sheer volume of unexpected breakage suggests that there are more to be discovered. Most impacted are unit tests and shell scripts that expect some utility to return syscall errors in stderr and propagate it to a non-zero exit code, where on Ubuntu 26.04 they might silently swallow (apparent, partial or complete) failure to execute the requested action.

(Also, uutils binaries are ridiculously large, but this is not such big deal: Ubuntu has for many years already built rather large initramfs and has yet to make progress in automatically detecting which firmware blobs cannot possibly be needed on a given system. I did run into an "undersized" partition layout because of Rust duplication.. but only on systems upgraded from ancient times before this was the norm.)

[1]: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues?q=is%3Aissue+%28l...

edelbitterabout 11 hours ago
On a more positive note, the thing that causes me some temporary pain might still be awesome for the long-term success of GNU/Linux (or whatever we shall call it now, still looking for an updated pasta[1] recipe). As much as it was a little too early a little too move fast break stuff, I applaud Ubuntu for demanding the drop-in-replacement to be possible.

To get where they are now, uutils needed to do the thing nobody bothered to do for 30 years: proper cli unit tests, the kind with which you can compare busybox/toybox/GNU/uutils/Darwin without depending on implementation details [2]. This will net more future good than current harm. Even if the tools cannot be changed to have fewer nonsensical edge cases for compatibility reasons, at least now I can ask $currentLLM to write me a better manpage, one that includes the gotchas [3] and factual errors that the 1996 (partly updated in 2004) version still fails. And improve shellcheck so even those among future generations that still need the shell as we know it today are not bitten by its warts as much.

[1]: https://safereddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/av4rl9/what_your... [2]: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils-tracking [3]: https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/coreutils-gotchas.html

collinfunkabout 5 hours ago
The [2] link is uutils using the test suite that the GNU coreutils maintainers, including myself, created and continue to improve. This test suite has long predated uutils and gets equal, if not more, man-hours than the program implementations themselves.

When you say that no one bothered to do this testing until uutils existed, it feels like you are discrediting our work. Any other implementation is free to use our test suite, as long as they respect its licensing. Doing so is relatively straightforward; you just need to point a shell variable to the place with the just-built binaries.

Note that the man pages are a quick reference explaining the options. A lot of gotchas and further explanations are located in the texinfo manual, which is over 300 pages in PDF form [1]. If you notice areas where it could be improved, I would be happy to review your bug report sent to [email protected].

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/coreutils.html

SirMasterabout 12 hours ago
alias_neoabout 11 hours ago
This is for the .1 release which allows you to upgrade from the previous LTS.

I had the prompt on my work machine this morning which was previously running 24.04.x and is now on 26.04.1.

mscrivoabout 12 hours ago
yes but this announcement is presumably about it being ungated for `do-release-upgrade` commands from existing 24.04 LTS installations.
SirMasterabout 10 hours ago
You couldn't have upgraded from 24.04 to 26.04?

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